The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  “I assume you have a point?”

  “I don’t get why she’d pick the name. Why position yourself as the queen of monsters?”

  “That’s because you’re a nerd, Nolan. You know this stuff and you cleave to the old-fashioned idea that words have histories and meanings and that people give a shit. Meanwhile she’s a teenager and cares not a jot. She hears the name from some emo YouTuber or Ariana Grande puts it in a song and suddenly Lilith’s all cool and rad.”

  “Not sure anybody says rad anymore, Ken.”

  “Well, they should. It’s a rad word.”

  “Something else I turned up in the dark of the night. You know that abandoned bar outside town? Called Olsen’s?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s built on the site of one of the earliest houses built near Birchlake. You’ll note I say ‘near,’ rather than ‘in.’ And one bonus fact: Alaina Hixon’s mom, Jenny. Her maiden name was Olsen.”

  “You seem to be under the illusion that you’re talking to Kristy, Nolan. I don’t care about any of this. And I’m not sure why you do, either.”

  “Because,” I said. “Hang on—is that him?” We stopped, peered into the trees, and I called out. “Pierre?”

  “I don’t see what you’re looking at,” Ken said.

  “Past those trees.”

  “Which trees, Nolan? We’re in a fucking forest.”

  I started in the direction in which I thought I’d seen Pierre. Ken followed, swearing quietly. The mist seemed thicker now—either that, or steadily declining light levels from above were making it seem gloomier overall.

  “Is that what you saw?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  It was a wall. A little under six feet tall. I’d seen the end, and—as it was about the same height as Pierre—mistaken it for a person. We moved around the side and soon saw that while it resembled all the others we’d seen in the mode of its construction, the shape was different. The previous ones had been semi-straight or wavy. Deliberately curved in one way or another. This had one long straight side, seventy or eighty feet in length. At the end of this there was a return, sharper than ninety degrees—and then a further straight line of about forty feet. Another turn, again not quite a right angle, leading to a further fifty feet or so.

  “There’s another one over there.”

  This wall had nothing straight about it. An imperfect semicircle, about four feet high. Imperfect partly because it looked like it had never been designed to be an exact half circle; also because, right in the middle, someone had pushed a hole through it. Rocks lay in a pile on the other side, leaving a gap wide enough to step through.

  I did so, and squatted down on the other side among the rocks. “This happened recently.”

  Ken stepped through the wall, too. “How do you know?”

  “Look at the lichen on this rock. There are scrapes when the rocks fell and crashed against each other. It hasn’t had time to regrow.”

  “How long does it take?” He shivered. “Does it suddenly feel a lot colder to you?”

  “I don’t know how long lichen takes to regrow. But the cuts look fresh. And look at the corner of that other structure. There’s a bunch of rocks missing from there, too.”

  We walked over and saw the same thing. Fallen rocks, with signs they’d been dislodged recently. And Ken was right. It did feel colder. I looked up. Through the mist and the trees I got a glimpse of the low, dark sky.

  Ken shivered again. “Do you think it’s that woman? The one who owns the space under Kristy’s apartment? The numbers on the bits of paper with them—they could be GPS coordinates from where she found them.”

  “Val. Could be. But why would you knock holes in the walls and take away rocks?”

  “Because she’s a loony, Nolan. Because she lives in a small, boring town in the middle of nowhere and there’s fuck-all else to do. Because…”

  He stopped talking.

  Mist often has a kind of motility to it, as microscopic droplets of water are swirled into motion by the wind, or breeze, or a movement of air too small for our skins to perceive. That wasn’t what we were seeing.

  We watched as the mist ten feet away from us moved. It looked for all the world like someone was walking through it, in a straight line. You could even see the mist curl lazily back around afterward, as if in someone’s wake.

  “Ken…”

  “Yeah, I’m seeing it.”

  And then the movement changed. It was as if whatever was causing it suddenly accelerated—running down past the far end of the wall, banking around it to disappear.

  For a few moments afterward the mist kept moving, then slowly returned to how it had been before.

  “Air current,” I said. “Temperature change.”

  “Science of some kind.”

  “Definitely.”

  But I don’t think either of us believed it anymore.

  Chapter

  ​36

  I don’t think he went this way,” Ken said. His voice was firm, but it sounded like he was speaking for the sake of it—as a way of not talking about what we’d just seen. “Do you?”

  “Why don’t we check in on Kris and Moll?”

  “They’d have called if they’d found him.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m going to do it anyway.”

  “Good idea.”

  The tips of my fingers were turning white. There was no question it was a lot colder than when we entered the forest. Two bars of signal. I called Kristy. It rang but went to voicemail.

  “Not answering?”

  “No. Try Molly.”

  “You do it, mate. I’m keeping my hands in my pockets.”

  I hit Molly’s speed-dial and waited. Her voice came on eventually, but only her voicemail message. Friendly but businesslike, her “I’m a nice person but don’t even think of bringing me a problem” tone.

  “Nope,” I said.

  Ken was frowning, however, and looking away into the trees. “Do it again. But take the phone away from your head.”

  I redialed then lowered the phone, holding it against my chest to muffle it.

  “You hear that?”

  I did. The faint sound of a phone ringing, some distance away in the woods. “Is that hers?”

  “I think so.” The sound stopped, as the called dead-ended in the message service again. “Must be. Do it again.”

  I redialed once more. The same tone, from the same direction. Ken and I turned on the spot, locking on to it.

  When the call failed again I stuffed the phone back in my pocket and we started walking fast.

  I called Molly again after about two hundred yards. The same tone, and definitely closer, but still some distance away and to the right of our current bearing.

  We set off once more and after five minutes passed another wall, in a strange fish-hook-like shape. Stones had been dislodged from the middle of it, and again, it looked as though it had happened recently.

  The mist was getting thicker, too. I know nothing about that kind of meteorological stuff, nor why it should be gathering more strongly. It was now sufficiently dense that it was hard to make out anything more than sixty feet away.

  “Stop,” Ken said.

  I listened, expecting to hear Kristy’s voice, or Molly’s. Nothing for a moment, but then the sound of a twig snapping—from behind me.

  I turned. Like most forests, this one varied in how the trees were arranged. Some parts were relatively open, others more dense. The area we’d just hurried through was somewhere in between. Trees ten to twenty feet apart. Not much in the way of bushes or undergrowth. Just the endless mist, curling between the trunks and around a few granite boulders.

  I was about to say something when there was a similar noise—from the right this time. A short snapping sound. Exactly what you’d expect from someone treading on a thin, dry branch. A person, or a deer, or a dog. If we’d been able to see any of those things, then the noise would have been wholly explicable. We c
ould not.

  Some kind of unusually heavy rat, maybe, or the ever-popular “temperature differential” rationale. Neither felt convincing. Your mind may think it’s smart, but your body knows the score. Mine did not believe we were alone.

  “I was hoping that was Pierre,” Ken said.

  “I think we’re going to have to let him find his own way out. We need to focus on finding Kristy and Molly.”

  Ken already had his phone in hand, and dialed. This time the ringing didn’t sound so far away—and it was coming from straight ahead.

  We went forward into the mist. Soon we came upon a bluff and had to scramble down. The lower ground was more uneven. More boulders, too—some of them pretty huge, gray eminences in the fog. We kept going, peering forward in hope of seeing a flash of color among the gray-green-brown. We called out, but got no response. “Are we close to the motel yet?”

  “Don’t think so,” Ken said. “We walked out a long way when we first came in here, and we’ve been bending farther and farther out while tracking Moll’s phone.”

  We were walking quickly now. Neither of us had encouraged the other to pick up speed. We were simply…walking fast. It felt like a good idea. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. It’s been bearing right all the time. We’ve got to be nearly a mile from town by now. Probably more.”

  “This is how you get lost in the woods,” I said.

  “Nolan, that’s not helping. And we’ve got GPS and there’s a compass on your phone and this is where the ringing was coming from—and so in general stop being a ponce and…”

  Molly was sitting on the ground thirty feet away.

  She was at the base of a tree, her back and head rested against it, legs out straight, hands in her lap.

  “Moll?” Ken squatted down to one side. Her mouth was half open. Her eyes were, too. Her phone was in her hands, the screen full of missed-call notifications.

  I put my fingers against her cheek. Her skin was warm. “Molly—wake up.”

  “Wake up? What are you talking about, Nolan? She’s not asleep.”

  Her pulse was strong. “Then what’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know. Call Kristy.”

  “We didn’t hear anything when I tried earlier. I think she’s left the ringer off.”

  “Just try it, mate. We need to get Moll back to town. Now.”

  I called Kristy. It felt like I’d done this about fifty times in the last twenty-four hours without an answer. I didn’t get one now either. “Stay with Molly,” I said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Whatever happened, Kristy’s not going to have bailed on her. She’ll be close by.”

  I walked a little way and called out Kristy’s name. It sounded odd to me. When you shout in an open space, most of the sound happens in your head. There was something else going on here. “You hear that?” I asked.

  “What?”

  I called out again—noticing as I did so that Molly didn’t flinch, even though it was very loud. “Like an echo.”

  “Trees. Or rocks.”

  Maybe, though it sounded more enclosed than that. I walked a little further. Then stopped.

  “Ken, come look at this.”

  In the mist about forty feet away was another wall. This wasn’t like the others, however. We walked to it together, then stood in silence.

  It was tall, maybe about eight feet high. Easily the biggest we’d seen. But that wasn’t the point. This wall wasn’t made of lichened rocks piled on top of one another. It was made of concrete. The surface was flat and smooth.

  “Fuck is this?” Ken said.

  “The ruins of an old house?”

  “Made of concrete? In the forest?”

  “Or a storage facility.”

  “The hell do you store a mile or two into the woods? And it looks new, doesn’t it?”

  I touched the wall. Drew my hand back, touched it again. “Ken—there’s something strange going on.”

  “No shit, Nolan.”

  “No, I mean—feel it. Feel the wall.”

  He did so, and immediately got what I meant. “What?”

  “You’re feeling it too, right?”

  “It doesn’t feel the way it looks. It looks smooth but it feels like those other walls. The ones made of rocks.”

  I drew my hand slowly over the surface, watching it slide smoothly across flatness. That’s what my eyes told me, anyway. It’s not how it felt. My fingertips were registering a far more uneven, scratchy material. Sharp edges and lichen.

  I stood back and looked along the wall. It stretched seventy or eighty feet. By the end the mist was so thick that it disappeared.

  I walked along it. Ken followed, casting a glance back to check on Molly. She was still gazing into space. At the end of the wall was a return, a precise right angle. It looked for all the world like the corner of an underground parking lot. “It’s getting darker,” Ken said.

  “It can’t be.” It seemed that way, though. I looked up but couldn’t even see the sky through the fog.

  “I can hear something, too.”

  All I could hear was the sound of blood in my ears, powered by a heart that was beating hard. But then, yes—something else. Far away, very quiet. Music?

  “Shit, Nolan,” Ken said. “It’s Kristy.”

  I followed him into the mist. Stopped as abruptly as he did. A little way ahead, the wall dead-ended in a sharp rocky bluff. The interface between the two was perfect, as though someone had put an inordinate amount of effort into making the join between wall and cliff as tight as possible.

  About ten feet short of that, a huge boulder was embedded in the wall. Again, the joins either side were perfect, as if the concrete had been poured around it.

  Kristy was leaning back against the bluff, apparently staring at the boulder. “Kristy? Are you okay?”

  She blinked, slowly.

  “What’s going on? What happened to Molly?”

  “Can you hear it?” Her voice was quiet.

  “Hear what? Kristy, let’s get back to town, okay?”

  “Tell me you can hear it.”

  And I could hear it now, a little more clearly. Music. And it sounded familiar. I knew I’d heard it recently.

  Ken suddenly turned his head to look back toward the trees. “Nolan—something’s coming.”

  “Pierre?”

  “Nah, I don’t think so.”

  “Kristy,” I said, reaching out to gently take her by the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s just…”

  “Steps,” Kristy said.

  I stopped because I realized why she’d been staring at the boulder. I don’t know how I hadn’t spotted it before, unless it was the change in angle.

  The boulder had steps in it. Cut cleanly, as if with an angle grinder. Though, the more I looked at the boulder, the less it seemed like a natural feature. Like the wall, it looked more like poured concrete.

  Kristy fell down. It was sudden, as though someone had pulled the plug. I managed to grab enough of her to break the fall and make sure she hit the ground fairly softly.

  “Ken—help.”

  My shout echoed in a strange, flat way. Ken didn’t come. He was standing weaving. He looked at me owlishly, as if very drunk. His voice was slurred. “Feeling kind of weird, mate.”

  “Tell me you can hear the music,” Kristy said, softly. “I don’t want to hear it alone.”

  “I can,” I said. There was a flat echo on it, and her voice, as if I was hearing sound in a space with lots of hard surfaces. I was so close to being able to remember what the song was now. The lyrics were…

  Kristy’s eyes widened. “Oh no.”

  She was staring at a point above and behind me. I turned and found myself looking up the staircase in the boulder. It didn’t look remotely natural now. There was a light at the top. Not some weird-ass ethereal light. Very mundane. As if there was a door up there in the mist, being opened as I watched—revealing a lit corridor beyond.

  F
or a moment it also looked like there was someone standing in it—a woman, with brown hair.

  Then they were gone, as everything went light.

  Chapter

  ​37

  After she pulled on her hoodie—the backup, in gray—Alaina paused in front of her bedroom mirror. Her skin was moon-pale, a legacy (so her mother used to say) of Scandinavian blood. Or Scottish. Or maybe Russian. She’d spun the story a few different ways. Alaina had wondered about getting one of those DNA tests from the internet, maybe asking for her birthday, but knew her dad wouldn’t go for it. He didn’t want her thinking about bloodlines.

  Didn’t matter. There were things tests weren’t able to show, areas where science—and fathers—didn’t know shit. Dumbasses. The fact they thought they knew everything only meant secrets were better hidden.

  One part of her mother’s stories Alaina did believe was that her side of the family started out over east. She’d never said, but implied, that they came west with a following wind—in the sense of being encouraged to move along. A family of strong women, none more so than Elizabeth Olsen—the woman whose portrait hung on the wall of the sitting room, the first to live in Birchlake. Or just outside, of course.

  Ladies who’d got in people’s faces. Who knew how to do the things that people weren’t supposed to know about, or want doing. Women who shored up the walls.

  But who sometimes exploded.

  Alaina missed her mom every day. She’d not been easy to live with, and Alaina understood that, were Mom still alive, they’d be having regular and CNN-worthy fights by now. That happens when swords clash. Sparks fly. Nobody’s going to back down—and nobody wants to admit that the new wave is here, and their time is done.

  Mom solved that problem herself. Dark road, late night, too much liquor.

  So people whispered when they thought her daughter couldn’t hear. But Alaina knew better. She had been in the car on evenings when her mom had been too drunk to speak, and her driving was fine. She’d felt more scared sometimes when Mom was sober—and, despite what people might imply, her mom had been sober most of the time. Too much, maybe. Sometimes you need white noise. Sometimes it gets too hard. If you choose—or are destined—to live outside, you’re going to withstand a lot more weather than other people. Dark rain will take its toll.